Personally, though I find disrespectful, as a French person, that the two nations of the Triple Entente to suffer the most casualties are "available as a DLC", my major problem with the "historical accuracy not included" attitude is that I doubt most people who are going to play that know much of anything about WWI, and this will likely lead to the same kind of myth you have about WWII (ie, "the USA and to a lesser extent the UK did most of the job on the European theater").
Yup. The US dominates the visual media - video games, motion pictures, TV series, etc. And every nation's history books play up that nation's role quite a lot. It's therefore no surprise that the whole Western world is learning seriously "americanized" history through their glass screens.
Do you find it disrespectful that the Axis can win in a game of Axis and Allies? Games are fundamentally open-ended by their nature. They cannot accurately represent history because history is not open-ended. That is in fact the defining characteristic of history, and it stands in direct contradiction to the concept of a game.
And this is an advertisement for a game. Complaining about it not being serious enough is not really that different from complaining that alcohol commercials don't show enough drunk driving accidents.
They can, however, try to accurately represent history at the beginning of the conflict (or at the first point that is shown in the game).
In truth, though, this is a very weak argument as far as WW2 (and probably the upcoming WW1) games go, because they tend to have a storyline that largely follows the actual historical development - i.e. "Axis cannot win" - but with some considerable liberties. That, yes, can be kinda disrespectful in some cases.
> Complaining about it not being serious enough is not really that different from complaining that alcohol commercials don't show enough drunk driving accidents.
It's a complaint that is biased in a particular direction. How would you feel if, in an alternate reality where Europe is the dominant power, you had a game about the US war of independence with US forces as DLC?
I wouldn't have a problem with it. (And I'm really not saying that just to win an argument.) It would be odd, for sure, but no more odd than having Abraham Lincoln fight vampires.
What is the casualty count below which it's okay to make something available as DLC? Would it have been more tasteful to have them included in the base game?
> Would it have been more tasteful to have them included in the base game?
I'd say so. I mean, well, it's like having a game about the Eastern Front in WWII with the Soviets on one side and the Hungarians and Italians on the other end, with the Germans as DLC. It may make a killing in Hungary and Italy, but it's bound to give a completely deformed version of the truth to anyone who doesn't known much about the original events.
If such a game was made by a Hungarian team, why would that be distasteful? It's pretty common for people to be primarily concerned by what happened with their own nation in history.
Look in the past week or two - the French have been commemorating Verdun, which was their WWI low point, but barely know about the Somme, which not only was the UK's low point, but also had half as many French casualties as at Verdun. Is it distasteful for the French to not commemorate the Somme? After all, the UK was France's major ally in that war, sending hundreds of thousands of it's youth to die for French soil.
Of course it isn't distasteful - the French national story is of Verdun, and they're not being distasteful by not ensuring all other major players get the same billing as they do in their own story.
